Juniper & Thorn(96)
Indrik sulked tremendously as they carried off the mirror and the lamp and three more vases, but we assuaged him with praise and scratches behind the ear. The goblin cried and cried until I picked it up and rocked it against my chest, and then it fell asleep in my arms.
I was surprised that we came to have many eager and competitive offers on the house, and Rose mediated the auction with a seabird’s watchful weather eye. In the end, it sold to a Yehuli man from a large surveying company, who wanted it only for the land underneath. He was going to have the whole house leveled so he could build up new apartments or maybe a hospital.
At first the prospect filled me with terror; I was imagining a skeleton of magic that had been laid out under the house like a network of tree roots, and once it was uncovered it would turn all the workers and the Yehuli buyer into lizards or toads. It did not seem unlike Papa, to do such a thing.
In fact, the moment we signed away our claim to the house and the garden, I expected some spectacular transformation to take place; at the very least, I expected a great wind to come along or the sky to darken overhead or the ground to tremble beneath our feet. But I saw only the Yehuli man blinking at me through his spectacles, and the pen’s ink bleeding onto my thumb.
As soon as the deed had been signed, the eyeless ravens took flight from our flowering pear tree and never returned. I had not seen the fiery serpent since I had given it suck that night in the garden, and I would never see it again; if it had fled, I did not notice it leaving.
I worried over Indrik’s fate, but not for long: a traveling circus hired him right away and gave him his own silk-and-velvet tent, where he entertained both admirers and skeptics for ten rubles apiece. I saw a daguerreotype of him in a newspaper many years later, his chest gleaming with linseed oil, his pockets heavy with gold.
I worried more over the goblin. It did not have the fortitude for circus life and hid in my skirts whenever the buyers and managers came loping around like scavenging dogs. So I plucked it up and held it and did not put it down as we walked out of the garden for the last time.
Behind us, a great many day laborers had already descended, shouting in at least two foreign tongues, axes swinging with shuddering force against the trunk of the juniper tree.
We had so much gold that Oblya seemed to open up in front of us like a rare and beautiful orchid. I saw my sister only one other time after we left the house with our rubles weighing down our pockets. She took an apartment above a coffeehouse and planted herbs in the window boxes. She smelled like a different sort of perfume, and there were a stranger’s slippers tucked under the bed, a coat that wasn’t hers hung on the back of the door.
She ate Merzani jelly candies and told me that her elixirs and herb mixes sold as well as they ever had, perhaps even better now that she was not buffeted this way and that by the tempestuous business models of our father. She had done a great deal to convince her clients that her potions worked because of science, not whimsy and magic, and for the most part they believed her.
When I was at the door, saying my farewell, Rose gripped my hand hard. “I sleep with the windows open every night so that I can feel the cold and imagine what it must have been like for you, forced to become a cold-blooded killing thing. Will you forgive me, Marlinchen? Please?”
I removed her grip and did not answer. I did not want the last thing my sister heard from me to be a lie.
And what of Sevas and me? We took an apartment together near the boardwalk, with two large, bright windows that overlooked the harbor and the stretching sea. I woke when the sun gently caressed my eyelids, and not because of the gonging of a grandfather clock. I taught Sevas the proper way to fold dough for varenyky and how to tell when the kvass in the jar had finished fermenting.
We smoked narghiles in Merzani coffeehouses and played dominoes in gambling dens. I was very bad at both, and at the end of the night I was always coughing and bereft of rubles. We admired the dachas along the shoreline and took mud baths at the sanatorium. We drank kumys on the boardwalk and sipped vodka in taverns. We danced half-soberly in the street, beneath the puddled lamplight, Sevas tucking his feet under mine so he could teach me the steps to a waltz.
I bought dresses with fashionable bustles and got my hair cut at a salon. The goblin lived with us, in a bed made out of moss and white gull feathers that we kept under the kitchen table. Sevas fed it scraps from his hand and I chained the icebox to keep it from ravaging our vegetables. I turned twenty-four and Sevas took me to a restaurant on Kanatchikov Street that served an Ionik custard drizzled with syrup; I dreamed about the taste and smell of it for weeks afterward.
But there was still some vestigial magic at work inside of us, thousands of tiny transformations always happening under our skin and inside of our minds. Some nights I woke up drenched in a frigid sweat, monstrous faces scored onto the insides of my eyelids, the shadows on our walls resembling the silhouettes of claws and teeth. On those nights Sevas held me in our bed, until the warm press of his body against mine lulled me into a tenuous slumber.
Other nights I woke panting with the memory of strange hands on my breasts and I could not bear to be touched, so Sevas took his pillow up off the bed and laid down on the floor beside me, filling the moonlit room with his soft breaths and aimless chatter. I fell asleep to the sound of him babbling about the high price of courgettes.
And then there were the nights when Sevas was the one who woke wild-eyed and weeping, and I held him and stroked his hair until his shoulders quit their shuddering. Other nights he, too, could not stand to feel another warm body beside him, and so I curled up on the floor with our goblin and recited Oblyan nursery rhymes, stopping only when I heard Sevas begin to snore.